The president of the United States, in his address to a joint session of Congress, knew that he was speaking for Americans across the country when he asked this question. Nine days earlier, on 11 September, an Islamic group named al-Qaeda had launched a series of devastating attacks against targets in New York and Washington. Planes had been hijacked and then crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Thousands had died. George W. Bush, answering his own question, had no doubt as to the motives of the terrorists. They hated America’s freedoms. Her freedom of religion, her freedom of speech. Yet these were not exclusively American. Rather, they were universal rights. They were as much the patrimony of Muslims as of Christians, of Afghans as of Americans. This was why the hatred felt for Bush and his country across much of the Islamic world was based on misunderstanding. ‘Like most Americans, I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are.’ If American values were universal, shared by humans across the planet, regardless of creed or culture, then it stood to reason that Muslims shared them too. Bush, sitting in judgement on the terrorists who had attacked his country, condemned them not just for hijacking planes, but for hijacking Islam itself. ‘We respect the faith. We honor its traditions. Our enemy does not.’ It was in this spirit that the President, even as he ordered the American war machine to inflict a terrible vengeance on al-Qaeda, aimed to bring to the Muslim world freedoms that he believed in all devoutness to be no less Islamic than they were Western. First in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, murderous tyrannies were overthrown. Arriving in Baghdad in April 2003, US forces pulled down statues of the deposed dictator. As they waited to be given sweets and flowers by a grateful people, they waited as well to deliver to Iraq the dues of freedom that Bush, a year earlier, had described as applying fully to the entire Islamic world. ‘When it comes to the common rights and needs of men and women, there is no clash of civilizations.’
Except that sweets and flowers were notable by their absence on the streets of Iraq. Instead, the Americans were greeted with mortar attacks, and car bombs, and improvised explosive devices. The country began to dissolve into anarchy. In Europe, where opposition to the invasion of Iraq had been loud and vocal, the insurgency was viewed with often ill-disguised satisfaction. Even before 9/11, there were many who had felt that ‘the United States had it coming’. By 2003, with US troops occupying two Muslim countries, the accusation that Afghanistan and Iraq were the victims of naked imperialism was becoming ever more insistent. What was all the President’s fine talk of freedom if not a smokescreen? As to what it might be hiding, the possibilities were multiple: oil, geopolitics, the interests of Israel. Yet Bush, although a hard-boiled businessman, was not just about the bottom line. He had never thought to hide his truest inspiration. Asked while still a candidate for the presidency to name his favourite thinker, he had answered unhesitatingly: ‘Christ, because he changed my heart.’ Here, unmistakably, was an Evangelical. Bush, in his assumption that the concept of human rights was a universal one, was perfectly sincere. Just as the Evangelicals who fought to abolish the slave trade had done, he took for granted that his own values—confirmed to him in his heart by the Spirit— were values fit for all the world. He no more intended to bring Iraq to Christianity than British Foreign Secretaries, back in the heyday of the Royal Navy’s campaign against slavery, had aimed to convert the Ottoman Empire. His ambition instead was to awaken Muslims to the values within their own religion that would enable them to see everything they had in common with America. ‘Islam, as practised by the vast majority of people, is a peaceful religion, a religion that respects others.’ Bush, asked to describe his own faith, might well have couched it in similar terms. What bigger compliment, then, could he possibly have paid to Muslims?
But Iraqis did not have their hearts opened to the similarity of Islam to American values. Their country continued to burn. To Bush’s critics, his talk of a war against evil appeared grotesquely misapplied. If anyone had done evil, then it was surely the leader of the world’s greatest military power, a man who had used all the stupefying resources at his command to visit death and mayhem on the powerless. In 2004 alone, US forces in Iraq variously bombed a wedding party, flattened an entire city, and were photographed torturing prisoners. [pages 505-507]
A Qur’an manuscript resting on a rehal.
Three pages further on, Holland continues:
Most menacing of all was the United Nations. Established in the aftermath of the Second World War, its delegates had proclaimed a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To be a Muslim, though, was to know that humans did not have rights. There was no natural law in Islam. There were only laws authored by God. Muslim countries, by joining the United Nations, had signed up to a host of commitments that derived, not from the Qur’an or the Sunna, but from law codes devised in Christian countries: that there should be equality between men and women; equality between Muslims and non-Muslims; a ban on slavery; a ban on offensive warfare. Such doctrines, al-aqdisi sternly ruled, had no place in Islam. To accept them was to become an apostate. Al-Zarqawi, released from prison in 1999, did not forget al-Maqdisi’s warnings. In 2003, launching his campaign in Iraq, he went for a soft and telling target. On 19 August, a car bomb blew up the United Nations headquarters in the country. The UN’s special representative was crushed to death in his office. Twenty-two others were also killed. Over a hundred were left maimed and wounded. Shortly afterwards, the United Nations withdrew from Iraq.
‘Ours is a war not against a religion, not against the Muslim faith.’ President Bush’s reassurance, offered before the invasion of Iraq, was not one that al-Zarqawi was remotely prepared to accept. What most people in the West meant by Islam and what scholars like al-Maqdisi meant by it were not at all the same thing. What to Bush appeared the markers of its compatibility with Western values appeared to al-Maqdisi a fast-metastasising cancer…
To al-Maqdisi, the spectacle of Muslim governments legislating to uphold equality between men and women, or between Islam and other religions, was a monstrous blasphemy. The whole future of the world was at stake. God’s final revelation, the last chance that humanity had of redeeming itself from damnation, was directly threatened… His [al-Maqdisi’s] incineration by a US jet strike in 2006 did not serve to kill the hydra…
All that counted was the example of the Salaf. When al-Zarqawi’s disciples smashed the statues of pagan gods, they were following the example of Muhammad; when they proclaimed themselves the shock troops of a would-be global empire, they were following the example of the warriors who had humbled Heraclius; when they beheaded enemy combatants, and reintroduced the jizya, and took the women of defeated opponents as slaves, they were doing nothing that the first Muslims had not gloried in. The only road to an uncontaminated future was the road that led back to an unspoilt past. Nothing of the Evangelicals, who had erupted into the Muslim world with their gunboats and their talk of crimes against humanity, was to remain. [pages 510-512]
– For the context of these translations click here –
In 718 Charles Martell (depicted left in the French book Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum) ravaged Saxony as far as the Weser and in the same or the following year defeated a detachment at Soissons under the command of the steward Raganfred and Duke Eudo of Aquitaine.
He soon led further campaigns against the Saxons, fighting them until 738, and even then Charles Martell was able to impose tribute and hostages on ‘those incorrigible heathens’. These are the words of our source: ‘The valiant Charles broke through with the Frankish army, encamped according to an intelligent plan at the mouth of the Lippe, by the stream of the Rhine, destroyed most of that strip of land with much bloodshed, made some of that savage people tributary, took many hostages and with God’s help returned home victorious’…
Charles Martell consolidated his power through continuous raids. Year after year he marched on a campaign, not only to secure his frontiers but also to expand them by subjugating and enslaving peoples. He didn’t only advance against the Neustrians; he also fought everywhere against the Alamans, over whom he achieved in 725 and 730 extremely bloody victories, while at the same time making Bishop Pirmin missionary in favour of his hegemony. Martell waged several wars against ‘the savage maritime nation of the Frisians’ (‘one of the main achievements of his life’—Braunfels) and two campaigns, in 733 and 737, ending even with a ‘bold maritime excursion’ and ‘with the right number of ships’ he advanced with his fleet up the Zuider-zee. He completely devastated the country, killed the duke, the ‘crafty councillor’ of the Frisians, and burned the pagan sanctuaries—with the good Christian art of spreading the good news of the gospel. He fought the Saxons, whom he sent Boniface with a letter of recommendation. He marched against the Thuringians and the Bavarians, over Burgundy and Provence.
The irruption of Islam
Islam, which sought to re-establish the original religion, the ‘religion of Abraham’, did not see in Moses and Jesus false prophets, but authentic prophets who hadn’t known the whole truth or whose teachings had been falsified by their disciples. Curiously, the new faith was at first regarded only as a ‘heresy’ of Eastern Christianity; nor is it strange that the scholastics still hesitate to designate the Muslims as ‘heretics or pagans’…
Under Abdul Malik (685-705) and his son Al-Walid I (705-715) the Muslims conquered Turkestan, the Caucasus and northern Africa where they ‘converted’ the Berbers. In 681 they reached the Atlantic coast of Morocco and in 697 conquered Carthage. By 698 they had definitively seized all the North African fortifications, and from Tunis, the new capital, the occupiers’ fleet controlled the western Mediterranean. Even before the end of the 15th century, the Arabs possessed the largest territorial empire in the history of the world, larger than the empire of Rome or the empire of Alexander. Their empire eventually stretched from the Aral Sea to the Nile and from the Bay of Biscay to China.
Within a generation, the Church had lost two-thirds of its faithful to Islam. And almost all Islamic conquests, except the territories of Spain and part of the Balkans, have remained Islamic to this day.
The first troops arrived on the Iberian peninsula, a group of about 400 men, in July 710. And the following year an invasion army of 7,000 soldiers arrived, soon reinforced by another 5,000. They entered through Gibraltar (named after the Arab sub-commander Tariq ibn-Ziyad). In the same year the invaders annihilated the army of the Hispanic Visigoths at the Battle of Jerez de la Frontera (Cadiz). By 715 they had occupied all the important cities in the country and in 720, after crossing the Pyrenees, they conquered Narbonne. The infidels were even said to have advanced as far as Tours to plunder the church treasury, stored in the tomb of Saint Martin.
It was there that Charles Martell faced the ‘infidels’ with the army summoned from all over the kingdom: plunderers against plunderers. Before the battle north of Poitiers they stalked each other for seven days, before the defeated Arabs, on 17 October 732, withdrew to Spain…
Charles Martell continued his fight against the Arabs in 735, 736, 737 and 739, repeatedly penetrating into Aquitaine, ‘the land of the Goths’, and Provence, the Roman province Gallia Narbonensis. After taking Avignon by assault, he had the defenders killed. Charles destroyed Nimes with its ancient amphitheatre and ravaged the cities Agde and Béziers. He had the most famous cities razed to the ground; with their houses and city walls, set fire to them and reduced them to ashes. He also destroyed the suburbs and fortifications of that territory. When Charles Martell had defeated the army of his enemies, he, who in all his decisions was guided by Christ, in whom alone is the gift of victory, returned safe to his region, the land of the Franks and the seat of his government…
The first ‘Carolingian’ ruled over the whole kingdom, moving among the Merovingian puppet kings. The sources call him dux and princeps, and the popes occasionally gave him the titles of patricias and sobregulus while for his part Martell accurately proclaimed himself maior domus. But he also financed many of his massacres with ecclesiastical goods—something which modern scholars have often falsely labelled secularisation—and continued to live as a plunderer of the Church. However, Charles Martell was anything but hostile to the Church or the clergy, as is shown by his exaltation by such prominent propagandists of Christianity as Pirmin, Willibrord and Boniface.
Without attempting a scientific classification of the inhabitants of Eurasia, it is sufficient to describe the three main races. The first are the yellow-skinned, straight black-haired, black-eyed, round-skulled Mongols and Mongoloids massed in central and eastern Asia north of the Himalayan system.
To the west of them, and merged with them, lie the Alpines, also characterized by dark, but not straight, hair, dark eyes, relatively short stature, and round skulls. These Alpines are thrust like a wedge into Europe between the Nordics and the Mediterraneans, with a tip that reaches the Atlantic Ocean. Those of western Europe are derived from one or more very ancient waves of round-skulled invaders from the East, who probably came by way of Asia Minor and the Balkans, but they have been so long in their present homes that they retain little except their brachycephalic skull-shape to connect them with the Asiatic Mongols.
South of the Himalayas and westward in a narrow belt to the Atlantic, and on both sides of the Inland Sea, lies the Mediterranean race, more or less swarthy-skinned, black-haired, dark-eyed, and long-skulled.
On the northwest, grouped around the Baltic and North Seas, lies the great Nordic race. It is characterized by a fair white skin, wavy hair with a range of color from dark brown to flaxen, light eyes, tall stature, and long skulls.
These races show other physical characters which are definite but difficult to describe, such as texture of skin and cast of features, especially of the nose. The contrast of mental and spiritual endowments is equally definite, but even more elusive of definition.
It is with the action and interaction of these three groups, together with internal civil wars, that recorded history deals.
While, so far as we know, these three races have occupied their present relative positions from the beginning, there have been profound changes in their distribution.
The two essential phenomena, however, are, first, the retreat of the Nordic race westward from the Grasslands of western Asia and eastern Europe to the borders of the Atlantic, until it occupies a relatively small area on the periphery of Eurasia.
The second phenomenon is of equal importance, namely, the more or less thorough Nordicizing of the westernmost extensions of the other two races, namely, the Mediterranean on the north coast of the Inland Sea, who have been completely Aryanized in speech, and have been again and again saturated with Nordic blood, and the even more profound Nordicization in speech and in blood of the short, dark, round-skulled inhabitants of central Europe, from Brittany through central France, southern Germany, and northern Italy into Austrian and Balkan lands. So thorough has been this process that the western Alpines have at the present time no separate race consciousness and are to be considered as wholly European.
As to the Alpines of eastern and central Europe, the Slavs, the case is somewhat different. East of a line drawn from the Adriatic to the Baltic the Nordicizing process has been far less perfect, although nearly complete as to speech, since all the Slavic languages are Aryan. Throughout these Slavic lands, great accessions of pure Mongoloid blood have been introduced within relatively recent centuries.
East of this belt of imperfectly Nordicized Alpines we reach the Asiatic Alpines, as yet entirely untouched by western blood or culture. These groups merge into the Mongoloids of eastern Asia.
So we find, thrust westward from the Heartland, a race touching the Atlantic at Brittany, thoroughly Asiatic and Mongoloid in the east, very imperfectly Nordicized in the centre, and thoroughly Nordicized culturally in the far west of Europe, where it has become, and must be accepted as, an integral part of the White World.
As to the great Nordic race, within relatively recent historic times it occupied the Grasslands north of the Black and Caspian Seas eastward to the Himalayas. Traces of Nordic peoples in central Asia are constantly found, and when archæological research there becomes as intensive as in Europe we shall be astonished to find how long, complete, and extended was their occupation of western Asia.
During the second millennium before our era successive waves of Nordics began to cross the Afghan passes into India until finally they imposed their primitive Aryan language upon Hindustan and the countries lying to the east.
All those regions lying northwest of the mountains appear to have been largely a white man’s country at the time of Alexander the Great. In Turkestan the newly discovered Tokharian language, an Aryan tongue of the western division, seems to have persisted down to the ninth century. The decline of the Nordics in these lands, however, began probably far earlier than Alexander’s time, and must have been nearly completed at the beginning of our era. Such blond traits as are still found in western Asia are relatively unimportant, and for the last two thousand years these countries must be regarded as lost to the Nordic race.
The impulse that drove the early Nordics like a fan over the Himalayan passes into India, the later Nordics southward into Mesopotamian lands, as Kassites, Mitanni, and Persians, into Greece and Anatolia as Achæans, Dorians, and Phrygians, westward as the Aryan-speaking invaders of Italy and as the Celtic vanguards of the Nordic race across the Rhine into Gaul, Spain, and Britain, may well have been caused by Mongoloid pressure from the heart of central Asia. Of course, we have no actual knowledge of this, but the analogy to the history of later migrations is strong, and the conviction is growing among historians that the impulse that drove the Hellenic Nordics upon the early Ægean culture world was the same as that which later drove Germanic Nordics into the Roman Empire.
North of the Caspian and Black Seas the boundaries of Europe receded steadily before Asia for nearly a thousand years after our era opened, but we have scant record of the struggles which resulted in the eviction of the Nordics from their homes in Russia, Poland, the Austrian and east German lands.
By the time of Charlemagne the White Man’s world was reduced to Scandinavia, Germany west of the Elbe, the British Isles, the Low Countries, and northern France and Italy, with outlying groups in southern France and Spain. This was the lowest ebb for the Nordics and it was the crowning glory of Charlemagne’s career that he not only turned back the flood, but began the organization of a series of more or less Nordicized marches or barrier states from the Baltic to the Adriatic, which have served as ramparts against Asiatic pressure from his day to ours. West of this line the feudal states of mediæval Europe developed into western Christendom, the nucleus of the civilized world of to-day.
South of the Caspian and Black Seas, after the first swarming of the Nordics over the mountains during the second millennium before Christ, the East pressed steadily against Europe until the strain culminated in the Persian Wars. The defeat of Asia in these wars resulted later in Alexander’s conquest of western Asia to the borders of India.
Alexander’s empire temporarily established Hellenic institutions throughout western Asia and some of the provinces remained superficially Greek until they were incorporated in the Roman Empire and ultimately became part of early Christendom. On the whole, however, from the time of Alexander the elimination of European blood, classic culture, and, finally, of Christianity, went on relentlessly.
By later Roman times the Aryan language of the Persians, Parthians, and people of India together with some shreds of Greek learning were about all the traces of Europe that were to be found east of the oscillating boundary along the Euphrates.
The Roman and Byzantine Empires struggled for centuries to check the advancing tide of Asiatics, but Arab expansions under the impulse of the Mohammedan religion finally tore away all the eastern and southern coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, while from an Arabized Spain they threatened western Europe. With the White Man’s world thus rapidly receding in the south, a series of pure Mongol invasions from central Asia, sweeping north of the Caspian and Black Seas, burst upon central Europe. Attila and his Huns were the first to break through into Nordic lands as far as the plains of northern France. None of the later hordes were able to force their way so far into Nordic territories, but spent their strength upon the Alpines of the Balkans and eastern Europe.
Eastern Germany, the Austrian states, Poland, and Russia had been Nordic lands before the Slavs emerged after the fall of Rome. Whether the occupation of Teutonic lands by the Wends and Slavs in eastern Europe was an infiltration or a conquest is not known, but the conviction is growing that, like other movements which preceded and followed, it was caused by Mongoloid pressure.
That the western Slavs or Wends had been long Nordicized in speech is indicated by the thoroughly Aryan character of the Slavic languages. They found in the lands they occupied an underlying Teutonic population. They cannot be regarded as the original owners of Poland, Bohemia, Silesia, or other Wendish provinces of eastern Germany and Austria. The Teutonic Marcomanni and Quadi were in Bohemia long before the Czechs came in through the Moravian Gate in the sixth century. Pomerania and the Prussias were the home of Teutonic Lombards, Burgunds, Vandals, and Suevi, while the Crimea and the northwestern coast of the Black Sea were long held by the Nordic Goths, who, just before our era, had migrated overland from the Baltic by way of the Vistula.
No doubt some of this Nordic blood remained to ennoble the stock of the later invaders, but by the time of Charlemagne, in the greater part of Europe east of the Elbe, the Aryan language was the only bond with Europe.
When the Frankish Empire turned the tide and Christianized these Wendish and Polish lands, civilization was carried eastward until it met the Byzantine influences which brought to Russia and the lands east of the Carpathians the culture and Orthodox Christianity of the Eastern or Greek Empire.
The nucleus of Russia was organized in the ninth century by Scandinavian Varangians, the Franks of the East, who founded the first civilized state amid a welter of semi-Mongoloid tribes. How much Nordic blood they found in the territories which afterward became Russia we have no means of knowing, but it must have been considerable because we do know that from the Middle Ages to the present time there has been a progressive increase in brachycephaly or broad-headedness, to judge from the rise in the percentage of round skulls found in the cemeteries of Moscow and elsewhere in Russia.
Such was the condition of eastern Europe when a new and terrible series of Mongoloid invasions swept over it, this time directly from the centre of Asia.
The effect of these invasions was so profound and lasting that it may be well to consider briefly the condition of eastern Europe after the elimination of the Nordics and its partial occupation by the so-called Slavs. Beginning with Attila and his Huns, in the fourth century, there was a series of purely Mongoloid tribes entering from Asia in wave after wave.
Similar waves ultimately passed south of the Black and Caspian Seas, and were called Turks, but these were long held back by the power of the Byzantine Empire, to which history has done scant justice.
In the north these invaders, called in the later days Tatars, but all essentially of central Asiatic Mongol stock, occupied Balkan lands after the expansion of the south Slavs in those countries. They are known by various names, but they are all part of the same general movement, although there was a gradual slowing down of the impulse. Prior to Jenghiz Khan the later hordes did not reach quite as far west as the earlier ones.
The first wave, Attila’s Huns, were followed during the succeeding centuries by the Avars, the Bulgars, the Hunagar Magyars, the Patzinaks and the Cumans. All of these tribes forced their way over the Carpathians and the Danube, and much of their blood, notably in that of the Bulgars and Magyars, is still to be found there. Most of them adopted Slavic dialects and merged in the surrounding population, but the Magyars retain their Asiatic speech to this day.
Other Tatar and Mongoloid tribes settled in southern and eastern Russia. Chief among these were the Mongol Chazars, who founded an extensive and powerful empire in southern and southeastern Russia as early as the eighth century. It is interesting to note that they accepted Judaism and became the ancestors of the majority of the Jews of eastern Europe, the round-skulled Ashkenazim.
Into this mixed population of Christianized Slavs and more or less Christianized and Slavized Mongols burst Jenghiz Khan with his great hordes of pure Mongols. All southern Russia, Poland, and Hungary collapsed before them, and in southern Russia the rule of the Mongol persisted for centuries, in fact the Golden Horde of Tatars retained control of the Crimea down to 1783.
Many of these later Tatars had accepted Islam, but entire groups of them have retained their Asiatic speech and to this day profess the Mohammedan religion.
The most lasting result of these Mongol invasions was that southern Poland and all the countries east and north of the Carpathians, including Rumania and the Ukraine, were saturated anew with Tatar blood, and, in dealing with these populations and with the new nations founded among them, this fact must not be forgotten.
The conflict between the East and the West—Europe and Asia—has thus lasted for centuries, in fact it goes back to the Persian Wars and the long and doubtful duel between Rome and Parthia along the eastern boundary of Syria. As we have already said, the Saracens had torn away many of the provinces of the Eastern Empire, and the Crusades, for a moment, had rolled back the East, but the event was not decided until the Seljukian and Osmanli Turks accepted Islam.
If these Turks had remained heathen they might have invaded and conquered Asia Minor and the Balkan States, just as their cousins, the Tartars, had subjected vast territories north of the Black Sea, but they could not have held their conquests permanently unless they had been able to incorporate the beaten natives into their own ranks through the proselytizing power of Islam.
Even in Roman times the Greek world had been steadily losing, first its Nordic blood and then later the blood of its Nordicized European population, and it became in its declining years increasingly Asiatic until the final fall of Constantinople in 1453.
Byzantium once fallen, the Turks advanced unchecked, conquering the Alpine Slav kingdoms of the Balkans and menacing Christendom itself.
In these age-long conflicts between Asia and Europe the Crusades seem but an episode, although tragically wasteful of Nordic stock. The Nordic Frankish nobility of western Europe squandered its blood for two hundred years on the desert sands of Syria and left no ethnic trace behind, save, perhaps, some doubtful blond remnants in northern Syria and Edessa.
If the predictions of Mr. Stoddard’s book seem far-fetched, one has but to consider that four times since the fall of Rome Asia has conquered to the very confines of Nordic Europe. The Nordicized Alpines of eastern Europe and the Nordicized Mediterraneans of southern Europe have proved too feeble to hold back the Asiatic hordes, Mongol or Saracen. It was not until the realms of pure Nordics were reached that the invaders were turned back. This is shown by the fact that the Arabs had quickly mastered northern Africa and conquered Spain, where the Nordic Goths were too few in number to hold them back, while southern France, which was not then, and is not now, a Nordic land, had offered no serious resistance. It was not until the Arabs, in 732, at Tours, dashed themselves to pieces against the solid ranks of heavy-armed Nordics, that Islam receded.
The same fate had already been encountered by Attila and his Huns, who, after dominating Hungary and southern Germany and destroying the Burgundians on the Rhine, had pushed into northern France as far as Châlons. Here, in 376, he was beaten, not by the Romanized Gauls but by the Nordic Visigoths, whose king, Roderick, died on the field. These two victories, one against the Arab south and the other over the Mongoloid east, saved Nordic Europe, which was at that time shrunken to little more than a fringe on the seacoast.
How slender the thread and how easily snapped, had the event of either day turned out otherwise! Never again did Asia push so far west, but the danger was not finally removed until Charlemagne and his successors had organized the Western Empire.
Christendom, however, had sore trials ahead when the successors of Jenghiz Khan destroyed Moscovy and Poland and devastated eastern Europe. The victorious career of the Tatars was unchecked, from the Chinese Sea on the east to the Indian Ocean on the south, until in 1241, at Wahlstatt in Silesia, they encountered pure Nordic fighting men. Then the tide turned. Though outnumbering the Christians five to one and victorious in the battle itself, the Tatars were unable to push farther west and turned south into Hungary and other Alpine lands.
Some conception of the almost unbelievable horrors that western Europe escaped at this time may be gathered from the fate of the countries which fell before the irresistible rush of the Mongols, whose sole discernible motive seems to have been blood lust. The destruction wrought in China, central Asia, and Persia is almost beyond conception. In twelve years, in China and the neighboring states, Jenghiz Khan and his lieutenants slaughtered more than 18,500,000 human beings. After the sack of Merv in Khorasan, the “Garden of Asia,” the corpses numbered 1,300,000, and after Herat was taken 1,600,000 are said to have perished. Similar fates befell every city of importance in central Asia, and to this day those once populous provinces have never recovered. The cities of Russia and Poland were burned, their inhabitants tortured and massacred, with the consequence that progress was retarded for centuries.
Almost in modern times these same Mongoloid invaders, entering by way of Asia Minor, and calling themselves Turks, after destroying the Eastern Empire, the Balkan States, and Hungary, again met the Nordic chivalry of western Europe under the walls of Vienna, in 1683, and again the Asiatics went down in rout.
On these four separate occasions the Nordic race and it alone saved modern civilization. The half-Nordicized lands to the south and to the east collapsed under the invasions.
Unnumbered Nordic tribes, nameless and unsung, have been massacred, or submerged, or driven from their lands. The survivors had been pushed ever westward until their backs were against the Northern Ocean. There the Nordics came to bay—the tide was turned. Few stop to reflect that it was more than sixty years after the first American legislature sat at Jamestown, Virginia, that Asia finally abandoned the conquest of Europe.
One of the chief results of forcing the Nordic race back to the seacoast was the creation of maritime power and its development to a degree never before known even in the days of the Phœnicians and Carthaginians. With the recession of the Turkish flood, modern Europe emerges and inaugurates a counter-attack on Asia which has placed virtually the entire world under European domination.
Wikipedia has the problem that many of its editors and administrators are either white traitors to the West or Jews like those of deMause’s journal. Although some scholars contribute to editing it, there is always an anti-westerner who censures the passages opposing the anti-white zeitgeist. For example, regarding the articles on infanticide I edited in 2008, a couple of Australian administrators from the English Wikipedia abused their powers. Not only did they eliminate most of the section on Australia within the article “Infanticide.” They went so far as to erase, from that online encyclopedia, an entire article that another editor had started. This last article focused on expanding the subject of the infanticide committed by aboriginal Australians. (Part of what was censored by Wikipedia is covered in this chapter, in the section on Australia.) Almost a decade later I learned that, since the 1970s, it has been a common practice in that continent to censor studies on infanticide, insofar as the aborigines have been idealized. Rewriting the history of the natives by vaporizing, in Stalin’s style, part of the collective memory of a nation misinforms visitors to the encyclopedia. But not all Wikipedia editors have behaved like that pair of administrators, so zealous in idealizing the natives in their country. In the archived Wikipedia talk page of Psychohistory, Loren Cobb said:
In my view, the psychohistory of Lloyd deMause is indeed a notable approach to history, in the sense in which Wikipedia uses the term “notability.” I am not personally involved in psychohistory—I am a mathematical sociologist—but here are some thoughts for your consideration.
Psychohistory as put forth by deMause and his many followers attempts to explain the pattern of changes in the incidence of child abuse in history. This is a perfectly respectable and non-fringe domain of scientific research. They argue that the incidence was much higher in the past, and that there has been an irregular history of improvement. This is a hypothesis that could just as easily have been framed by an epidemiologist as a psychologist. DeMause proposes a theory that society has gone through a series of stages in its treatment and discipline of children.
Again, this is well within the bounds of social science. None of these questions are pseudoscientific. Even the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, a bastion of scientific epidemiology, is interested in these kinds of hypotheses.1
I exchanged a few e-mails with Cobb, who like me is very critical of the psychoanalytic tail in deMausean legacy, and his position piqued my interest.
This chapter summarizes the data collected in the first exhaustive study on infanticide: a book by Larry Milner, Hardness of Heart, published in the last year of the 20th century. That so many researchers have produced astronomical figures on the extent of infanticide moves me to think that Milner’s initiative to devote ten years of his life researching the topic should be undertaken by others. Only then can we be sure if such large numbers are accurate.
Joseph Birdsell believes in infanticide rates of 15-50 percent of the total number of births in prehistoric times.2 Laila Williamson estimated a lower rate ranging from 15-20 percent.3 Both believe that high rates of infanticide persisted until the development of agriculture.4 Some comparative anthropologists have estimated that 50 percent of female newborn babies were killed by their parents in the Paleolithic.5 These figures appear over and over in the research of other scholars.
Paleolithic and Neolithic
Decapitated skeletons of hominid children have been found with evidence of cannibalism. Neanderthal man performed ritual sacrifices of children. As shown in the bas-reliefs of a Laussel cave, a menstruating goddess is appeased only by the sacrifice of infants.6
Marvin Harris, the creator of the anthropological movement called cultural materialism, estimated that in the Stone Age up to 23-50 percent of newborns were put to death. However, Harris conceived a rational explanation. In his book Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures, published in 1977, he says that the goal was to preserve the population growth to 0.001 percent. This explanation of more “civilized” cavemen than us has not been taken seriously among other scholars. But the renowned geneticist James Neel surpasses him. Through a retroactive model to study the customs of contemporary Yanomami Indians he estimated that in prehistoric times the infanticidal rate was 15-20 percent. However, Neel wrote: “I find it increasingly difficult to see in the recent reproductive history of the civilized world a greater respect for the quality of human existence than was manifested by our remote ‘primitive’ ancestors.” Ark would have scoffed at this claim. The fact that Neel published such praise for the infanticidal cavemen in Science,7 one of the most prestigious scientific journals, shows the levels of psychogenic regression that we suffer in our times.
Ancient World
As we have seen, the sacrifice of children was much more common in the Ancient World than in present times. Three thousand bones of young children, with evidence of sacrificial rituals, have been found in Sardinia. Infants were offered to the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. Pelasgians offered a sacrifice of every tenth child during difficult times. Syrians sacrificed children to Jupiter and Juno. Many remains of children have been found in Gezer excavations with signs of sacrifice. Child skeletons with the marks of sacrifice have been found also in Egypt dating 950-720 B.C. In Carthage “[child] sacrifice in the ancient world reached its infamous zenith.”8 Besides the Carthaginians, other Phoenicians, and the Canaanites, Moabites and Sepharvites offered their first-born as a sacrifice to their gods.
Carthage. Charred bones of thousands of infants have been found in Carthaginian archaeological sites in modern times. One such area harbored as many as 20,000 burial urns. It is estimated that child sacrifice was practiced for centuries in the region. Plutarch (ca. 46-120 AD) mentions the practice, as do Tertullian, Orosius, Diodorus Siculus and Philo. The Hebrew Bible also mentions what appears to be child sacrifice practiced at a place called the Tophet (from the Hebrew taph or toph, to burn) by the Canaanites, ancestors of the Carthaginians, and by some Israelites. Writing in the 3rd century B.C., Kleitarchos, one of the historians of Alexander the Great, described that the infants rolled into the flaming pit. Diodorus Siculus wrote that babies were roasted to death inside the burning pit of the god Baal Hamon, a bronze statue.9
Greece and Rome. In the Persian mythology of Zoroastrianism, at birth some children are devoured by their parents: a fable reminiscent of Cronus. Rhea hid Zeus and presented a stone wrapped in strips, which Cronus took as a swaddled baby and ate it. Cronus represents the archaic Hellas.
The historical Greeks considered barbarous the practice of adult and child sacrifice.10 It is interesting to note how conquerors like Alexander are diminished under the new psychohistorical perspective. If we give credence to the assertion that Thebes, the largest city in the region of Boeotia, had lower rates of exposure than other Greek cities, its destruction by Alexander was a fatal blow to the advanced psychoclass in Greece. A few centuries later, between 150 and 50 B.C. an Alexandrian Jew wrote Wisdom of Solomon, which contains a diatribe against the Canaanites whom he calls perpetrators of “ruthless murders of their children.” (Note how the biblical classics, the 16th-century chroniclers, and the 19th-century anthropologists wield value judgments, something banned in an academy under the shadow of Franz Boas.)
In The Histories Polybius was already complaining in the 2nd century B.C. that parents severely inhibited reproduction, and by the 1st century there were several thinkers who spoke out against the exposure of babies. Epictetus wondered “A sheep does not abandon its own offspring, nor a wolf; and yet does a man abandon his?” In the Preface we saw that in the same century Philo was the first philosopher to speak out against exposure.11
“The greatest respect is owed to a child,” wrote Juvenal, born in 55 AD. His contemporary Josephus, a Romanized Jew, also condemned exposure. And in Heroides, an elegiac poem that he wrote before his exile, Ovid asked, “What did the child commit, in so few hours of life?” However, two centuries after Augustus, in times of Constantine Rome struggled with a decreased population due to exposure. The legend of Romulus and Remus is also revealing: two brothers had been exposed to die but a she-wolf saved them. Romulus forced the Romans to bring up all males and the first female and forbade killing them after a certain age. As Rhea saving his son Zeus, this legend portrays the psychogenic landmark of classical culture compared with other cultures of the Ancient World. But even so, exposure was practiced. A letter from a Roman citizen to his wife, dating from 1 B.C., demonstrates the casual nature with which infanticide was often viewed:
Know that I am still in Alexandria. […] I ask and beg you to take good care of our baby son, and as soon as I received payment I shall send it up to you. If you are delivered, if it is a boy, keep it, if a girl, discard it.12
In some periods of Roman history it was traditional for a newborn to be brought to the pater familias, the family patriarch, who would then decide whether the child was to be kept and raised, or left to death by exposure. The Twelve Tablets of Roman law obliged him to put to death a child that was visibly deformed. Infanticide became a capital offense in Roman law in 374 AD but offenders were rarely if ever prosecuted.13
Hebrew people. Although the Bible says many Hebrews sacrificed their children to pagan gods, Judaism prohibits infanticide (I will approach the subject of the recent studies on the Israelites in the last chapter). Tacitus recorded that the Jews “regard it as a crime to kill any late-born children.”14 Josephus, whose works give an important insight into first-century Judaism, wrote that God “forbids women to cause abortion of what is begotten, or to destroy it afterward.”15
Pagan European tribes. John Boswell believed that in ancient Germanic tribes unwanted children were exposed, usually in the forest. “It was the custom of the pagans that if they wanted to kill a son or daughter, they would be killed before they had been given any food.”16 In the most influential archeological book of the 19th century, Prehistoric Times, John Lubbock invented the terms Paleolithic and Neolithic. He described that burnt bones indicated the practice of child sacrifice in pagan Britain.17
The Christian Era
Something goes completely unnoticed for the modern mind. In a world plagued by sacrifices like the Old World, the innocent son has to die ordered by his father: a well-known practice. It is impossible to understand the psychoclass that gave rise to Christianity by overlooking this reality converted into a powerful symbol. This is true despite, as I have stated in the previous pages, that forms of upbringing should have suffered, in general terms, a regression throughout the Middle Ages. The Teachings of the Apostles or Didache said: “You shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born.”18The Epistle of Barnabas stated an identical command.19 So widely accepted was this teaching in Christendom that apologists Tertullian, Athenagoras, Minucius Felix, Justin Martyr and Lactantius also maintained that exposing a baby to death was a wicked act. In 318 AD Constantine considered infanticide a crime but reinstated the practice of selling one’s own children. The West took its time to consider criminal the late forms of infanticide. The author of the Codex Theodosianus complained in 322 AD:
We have learned that in provinces where there are shortages of food and lack of livelihood, parents are selling or pledging their children. Such an ignominious act is repugnant to our customs.
Towards 340 AD Lactantius argued that strangling newborns was sinful. Already within the historical period known as Christendom, infanticide was not officially banned in Roman criminal law until 374 AD when Valentinian I mandated to rear all children (exposing babies, especially girls, was still common). However, both exposure and child abandonment continued in Europe.
Middle Ages. The practice was so entrenched, as well as the sale of children, that it had been futile to decree the abolition of such customs. Until 500 AD it could not be said that a baby’s life was secure. The Council of Constantinople declared that infanticide was a homicide, and in 589 AD the Third Council of Toledo took measures against the Spanish custom of killing their own children.20 Whereas theologians and clerics preached to spare their lives, newborn abandonment continued as registered in both the literature record and in legal documents.21 More archaic forms of infanticide, such as sacrifice, were practiced by the Gauls, Celts and the Irish. “They would kill their piteous wretched offspring with much wailing and peril, to pour their blood around Crom Cruaich,” a deity of pre-Christian Ireland.22 Unlike other European regions, in the Middle Ages the German mother had the right to expose the newborn.23 In Gotland, Sweden, children were also sacrificed.24 According to William Langer, exposure in the Middle Ages “was practiced on a gigantic scale with absolute impunity, noticed by writers with most frigid indifference.”25 By the end of the 12th century, notes Richard Trexler, Roman women threw their newborns into the Tiber River even in daylight.26 In Russia, peasants sacrificed their sons and daughters to the pagan god Perun. Some residents of rural areas got rid of their babies by throwing them to the hogs. In Medieval Russia secular laws did not deal with what, for the church, was a crime.27 The Svans killed the newborn females by filling their mouths with hot ashes. In Kamchatka, babies were killed and thrown to wild dogs.28
The darkness of Europe would begin to fade in the 12th century. As explained above, the “little Renaissance” of that century reminds me the famous series of Kenneth Clark, the first of its kind that showed us the personal view of an intellectual in a television series. Other cultures would be arrested in their ways of treatment of women and children.
China and Japan. The American explorer George Kennan noted that among the Koryaks, a Mongoloid people of north-eastern Siberia, infanticide was still common in the 19th century. One of the twins was always sacrificed.29 Since the 17th century Jesuit missionaries had found thousands of babies, mostly women, abandoned on the streets of China. Marco Polo, the famed explorer, saw newborns exposed in Manzi.30 China’s society promoted gendercide. The philosopher Han Fei Tzu, a member of the ruling aristocracy of the 3rd century B.C., who developed a school of law, wrote: “As to children, a father and mother when they produce a boy congratulate one another, but when they produce a girl they put it to death.”31 Among the Hakka people, and in Yunnan, Anhwei, Szechwan, Jiangxi and Fukien a method of killing the baby was to put her into a bucket of cold water, which was called “baby water.” 32 Even before feudal Japan infanticide was performed. The common slang for infanticide was mabiki which means to pull plants from an overcrowded garden. It has been estimated that 40 percent of newborn babies were killed in Kyushu.33 A typical method in Japan was smothering through wet paper on the baby’s mouth and nose.34Mabiki persisted in the 19th and early 20th centuries.35
India and Pakistan. Female infanticide of newborn girls was systematic in feudatory Rajputs in India. According to Firishta (approx. 1560-1620), as soon as a female child was born she was holding “in one hand, and a knife in the other, that any person who wanted a wife might take her now, otherwise she was immediately put to death.”36 The practice of female infanticide was also common among the inhabitants of Kutch, Kehtri, Nagar, Gujarat, Miazed, Kalowries and also among the Sind in Pakistan.37 It was not uncommon that parents threw a child to the crocodiles in the Ganges River as a sacrificial offering. The British colonists were unable to outlaw the custom until the beginnings of the 19th century.38
Arabia and Islam. Female infanticide was common all over Arabia during pre-Islamic Arabia, especially by burying alive the newborn female.39 Later it would be explicitly prohibited by the Koran: “And do not kill your children for fear of poverty; We give them sustenance and yourselves too; Surely to kill them is a great wrong.”40 However, in spite of this emergent psychoclass, if compared with their infanticidal neighbors of the Arabian peninsula, the forms of childcare and the treatment of women in Islam would be stagnant for centuries.
Tribes
Infanticide in tribal societies was, and in some tribes still is, more frequent than infanticide in both Western and Eastern civilizations.
Africa. In this continent newborns were killed because of fear that they were an evil omen or because they were considered unlucky. Twins were usually put to death in Arebo; as well as by the Nama Hottentots of South West Africa; in the Lake Victoria Nyanza region; by the Tswana in Portuguese East Africa; among the Ilso and Ibo people of Nigeria; and by the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert.41 The Kikuyu, Kenya’s most populous ethnic group, practiced ritual killing of twins.42 Lucien Lévy-Brühl noted that, as a result of fearing a drought, if a baby was born feet first in British East Africa, she or he was smothered.43 The Tswana people did the same since they feared the newborn would bring ill fortune to the parents.44 Similarly, William Sumner noted that the Vadshagga killed children whose upper incisors came first.45 If a mother died in childbirth among the Ibo people of Nigeria, the newborn was buried alive. It suffered a similar fate if the father died.46 In The Child in Primitive Society, Nathan Miller wrote in the 1920s that among the Kuni tribe every mother had killed at least one of her children.47 Child sacrifice was practiced as late as 1929 in Zimbabwe, where a daughter of the tribal chief used to be sacrificed as a petition of rain.48
Oceania and the Pacific Islands. Infanticide among the autochthon people in the Oceania islands is widespread. In some areas of the Fiji islands up to 50 percent of newborn infants were killed.49 In the 19th-century Ugi, in the Solomon Islands almost 75 percent of the indigenous children had been brought from adjoining tribes due to the high incidence rate of infanticide, a unique feature of these tribal societies.50 In another Solomon island, San Cristóbal, the firstborn was considered ahubweu and often buried alive.51 As a rationale for their behavior, some parents in British New Guinea complained: “Girls […] don’t become warriors, and they don’t stay to look for us in our old age.”52
Australia. According to Bronislaw Malinowski, who wrote a book on indigenous Australians in the early 1960s, “infanticide is practiced among all Australian natives.”53 The practice has been reported in Tasmania, Western Australia, Central Australia, South Australia, in the Northern Territory, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. Anthropologist Géza Róheim wrote:
When the Yumu, Pindupi, Ngali, or Nambutji were hungry, they ate small children with neither ceremonial nor animistic motives. Among the southern tribes, the Matuntara, Mularatara, or Pitjentara, every second child was eaten in the belief that the strength of the first child would be doubled by such a procedure.54
Family units usually consisted of three children. Brough Smyth, a 19th century researcher, estimated that in Victoria about 30 percent of the births resulted in infanticide.55 Mildred Dickeman concurs that the figure is accurate in other Australia tribes as a result of a surplus of the birthrate.56 Cannibalism was observed in Victoria at the beginning of the 20th century. The Wotjo tribe, as well as the tribes of the lower Murray River, sometimes killed a newborn to feed an older sibling.57 Thomas Robert Malthus said that, in the New South Wales region when the mother died sucking infants were buried alive with her.58 In the Darling River region, infanticide was practiced “by a blow on the back of the head, by strangling with a rope, or chocking with sand.”59 In Queensland a tribal woman only could have children after the age of thirty. Otherwise babies would be killed.60 The Australian Aranda tribes in the Northern Territory used the method of choking the newborn with coal, sand or kill her with a stick.61 According to James George Frazer, in the Beltana tribes in South Australia it was customary to kill the first-born.62 Twins were always killed by the Arrernte in central Australia.63 In the Luritcha tribe occasional cannibalism of young children occurred.64 Aram Yengoyan calculated that, in Western Australia, the Pitjandjara people killed 19 percent of their newborns.65 In the 19th century the native Tasmanians were exterminated by the colonists, who regarded them as a degenerate race. Richard H. Davies (fl. 1830s-1887), a brother of Archdeacon Davies, wrote that Tasmanian “females have been known to desert their infants for the sake of suckling the puppies,” which were later used for hunting.66 Like other tribal Australians, when the mother died the child was buried as well.67
Polynesia. In ancient Polynesian societies infanticide was fairly common.68 Families were supposed to rear no more than two children. Writing about the natives Raymond Firth noted: “If another child is born, it is buried in the earth and covered with stones.”69 In Hawaii infanticide was a socially sanctioned practice before the Christian missions.70 Infanticidal methods included strangling the children or, more frequently, burying them alive.71 Infanticide was quite intense in Tahiti.72 Methods included suffocation, neck breaking and strangulation.73
North America. Infanticide and child sacrifice was practiced in the New World at times when in Western Europe it had been largely abandoned. There is no agreement about the actual estimates of the frequency of newborn female infanticide in the Eskimo population. Carmel Schrire mentions diverse studies ranging from 15-50 percent to 80 percent.74 Polar Eskimos killed the child by throwing him or her into the sea.75 There is even a legend in Eskimo folklore, “The Unwanted Child,” where a mother throws her child into the fjord. The Yukon and the Mahlemuit tribes of Alaska exposed the female newborns by stuffing their mouths with grass before leaving them to die.76 In Arctic Canada the Eskimos exposed their babies on the ice and left them to die.77 Female Eskimo infanticide disappeared in the 1930s and 1940s after contact with the Western cultures of the South.78 The Handbook of North American Indians reports infanticide and cannibalism among the Dene Indians and those of the Mackenzie Mountains.79 In the Eastern Shoshone there was a scarcity of Indian women as a result of female infanticide.80 For the Maidu Native Americans in the United States twins were so dangerous that they not only killed them, but the mother as well.81 In the region known today as southern Texas, the Mariame Indians practiced infanticide of females on a large scale. Wives had to be obtained from neighboring groups.82
South American tribes. Although data of infanticides among the indigenous people in South America is not as abundant as data from North America, the estimates seem to be similar. The Tapirapé indigenous people of Brazil allowed no more than three children per woman, and no more than two had to be of the same sex. If the rule was broken infanticide was practiced.83 The people in the Bororo tribe killed all the newborns that did not appear healthy enough. Infanticide is also documented in the case of the Korubo people in the Amazon.84
While Capacocha sacrifice was practiced in the Peruvian large cities, child sacrifice in the pre-Columbian tribes of the region is less documented. However, even today studies on the Aymara Indians reveal high incidences of mortality among the newborn, especially female deaths, suggesting infanticide.85 Infanticide among the Chaco in Paraguay was estimated as high as 50 percent of all newborns in that tribe, who were usually buried.86 The infanticidal custom had such roots among the Ayoreo in Bolivia and Paraguay that it persisted until the late 20th century.87
Conclusion
As can be gathered from the above data, it is possible to support psychohistory’s cornerstone, the idea of an infanticidal psychoclass, with sources other than those used by deMause. The main criticism of historian Julie Hofmann Kemp to the deMausean model has, therefore, been solved.
References
1 Loren Cobb signs under a penname in Wikipedia. His post appeared in the talk page of Psychohistory (03:41, April 3, 2008).
2 Birdsell, Joseph, B. (1986), “Some predictions for the Pleistocene based on equilibrium systems among recent hunter-gatherers,” in Richard Lee and Irven DeVore, Man the Hunter, Aldine Publishing Co., p. 239.
3 Williamson, Laila (1978), “Infanticide: an anthropological analysis,” in Kohl, Marvin, Infanticide and the Value of Life, New York: Prometheus Books, pp. 61-75.
4 Milner, Larry S. (2000). Hardness of Heart / Hardness of Life: The Stain of Human Infanticide. Lanham/New York/Oxford: University Press of America, p. 19.
5 Hoffer, Peter, N.E.H. Hull (1981). Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and America, 1558-1803. New York University Press, p. 3.
6 Simons, E. L. (1989). “Human origins.” Science, 245: p. 1344.
7 Neel, James. (1970). “Lessons from a ‘primitive’ people.” Science, 1: p. 816.
8 Milner: Hardness of Heart (op. cit.) p. 324.
9 Brown, Shelby (1991). Late Carthaginian Child Sacrifice and Sacrificial Monuments in their Mediterranean Context. Sheffield Academic Press, pp. 22s. See also: Stager, Lawrence, Samuel R. Wolff (1984). “Child sacrifice at Carthage—religious rite or population control?” Biblical Archaeology Review 10: pp. 31-51.
10 Hughes, Dennis D. (1991). Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece. Routledge, p. 187.
11 Philo (1950). The Special Laws. Harvard University Press, Vol. VII, pp. 117s, 551, 549.
12 Naphtali, Lewis, ed. (1985), “Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 744,” Life in Egypt Under Roman Rule, Oxford University Press, p. 54.
13 Radville, Samuel X. (1974), “A history of child abuse and infanticide,” in Steinmetz, Suzanne K. and Murray A. Strauss, Violence in the Family, New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., pp. 173-179.
14 Tacitus (1931). The Histories. London: William Heinemann, Vol. II, p. 183.
15 Josephus (1976). The Works of Flavius Josephus, “Against Apion.” Cambridge: Harvard University Press, II.25, p. 597.
16 John Boswell (1988). The Kindness of Strangers. New York: Vintage Books, p. 211.
17 Lubbock, John (1865). Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages. London: Williams and Norgate, p. 176.
18 Robinson, J. Armitage (translator) (1920), “Didache,” Barnabas, Hermar and the Didache, Vol. D.ii.2c, New York: The MacMillan Co., p. 112.
19 Ibid., Epistle of Barnabas, xix. 5d.
20 Radbill, Samuel X. (1974), “A history of child abuse and infanticide,” in Steinmetz, Suzanne K. and Murray A. Straus, Violence in the Family, New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., pp. 173-179.
21 John Boswell (1984). “Exposition and oblation: the abandonment of children and the ancient and medieval family.” American Historical Review 89: pp. 10-33.
22 Dorson, Richard (1968). Peasant Customs and Savage Myths: Selections from the British Folklorists. University of Chicago Press, p. 351.
23 Westrup, C.W. (1944). Introduction to Roman Law. Oxford University Press, p. 249.
24 Turville-Petre, Gabriel (1964). Myth and Religion of the North: The Religion of Ancient Scandinavia. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, p. 253.
25 Langer, William L. (1974). “Infanticide: a historical survey.” History of Childhood Quarterly, 1, pp. 353-366.
26 Trexler, Richard (1973). “Infanticide in Florence: new sources and first results.” History of Childhood Quarterly, 1: p. 99.
27 Ransel, David (1988). Mothers of Misery. Princeton University Press, pp. 10-12.
28 McLennan: Studies in Ancient History (op. cit.), pp. 105s.
29 Kennan, George (1986 [originally published in 1871]). Tent Life in Siberia. New York: Gibbs Smith.
30 Polo, Marco (1965). The Travels. Middlesex: Penguin Books, p. 174.
31 Yu-Lan, Fung (1952). A History of Chinese Philosophy. Princeton University Press, p. 327.
32 Yao, Esther S. Lee (1983). Chinese Women: Past and Present. Mesquite: Ide House, p. 75.
33 Kushe, Helga and Peter Singer (1985). Should the Baby Live? Oxford University Press, p. 106.
34 Shiono, Hiroshi and Atoyo Maya, Noriko Tabata, Masataka Fujiwara, Junich Azumi and Mashahiko Morita (1986). “Medico-legal aspects of infanticide in Hokkaido District, Japan.” American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, 7: p. 104.
35 Vaux, Kenneth (1989). Birth Ethics. New York: Crossroad, p. 12.
36 Westermarck, Edward (1968). A Short History of Marriage. New York: Humanities Press, Vol. III, p. 162.
37 Panigrahi, Lalita (1972). British Social Policy and Female Infanticide in India. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, p. 18.
38 Davies, Nigel (1981). Human Sacrifice. New York: William Morrow & Co, p. 18.
39 Milner: Hardness of Heart, (op. cit.), p. 59. See also: Smith, William Robertson (1903). Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia. London: Adam & Charles Block, p. 293.
40 The Koran, XVII:31. See also LXXXI:8-9, XVI:60-62, XVII:42 and XLII:48.
41 Milner: Hardness of Heart (op. cit.) pp. 160s.
42 LeVine, Sarah and Robert LeVine (1981), “Child abuse and neglect in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Korbin, Jill, Child Abuse and Neglect, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 39.
43 Lévy-Brühl, Lucien (1923). Primitive Mentality. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., p. 150.
44 Schapera, I.A. (1955). A Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom. Oxford University Press, p. 261.
45 Sumner, William (1956 [originally published in 1906). Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals. Oxford University Press, p. 274.
46 Basden, G.T. (1996). Niger Ibos. New York: Barnes & Noble, pp. 180-184, 262s.
47 Miller, Nathan (1928). The Child in Primitive Society. New York: Bretano’s, p. 37.
48 Davies: Human Sacrifice (op. cit.), p. 143.
49 McLennan, J.F. (1886). Studies in Ancient History, The Second Series. New York: MacMillan & Co., Ltd., pp. 90s.
50 Guppy, H.B. (1887). The Solomon Islands and Their Natives. London: Swan Sonnenschein, p. 42.
51 Frazer, J.G. (1935). The Golden Bough. New York: MacMillan Co., pp. 332s.
52 Langness, L.L. (1984), “Child abuse and cultural values: the case of New Guinea,” in Korbin, Jill, Child Abuse and Neglect: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 15.
53 Malinowski, Bronislaw (1963). The Family Among the Australian Aborigines. New York: Scocken Books, p. 235.
54 Róheim, Géza (1962). “The Western tribes of Central Australia: childhood.” The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, 2: p. 200.
55 Smyth, Brough (1878). The Aborigines of Australia. London: John Ferres, p. 52.
56 Dickeman, Mildred (1975). “Demographic consequences of infanticide in man.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 6: p. 121.
57 Howitt, A.W. (1904). The Native Tribes of South-East Australia. MacMillan & Co., Ltd., pp. 749s.
58 Malthus, Thomas Robert (1963). On Population. New York: The Modern Library, I.III, p. 170.
59 Bonney, Frederic (1884). “On some customs of the aborigines of the River Darling.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 13: p. 125.
60 Cowlishaw, Gillian (1978). “Infanticide in aboriginal Australia.” Oceania, 48: p. 267.
61 Murdock, G.P. (1971). Our Primitive Contemporaries. New York: Macmillan, p. 34.
62 Frazer, James George (1963). The Dying God. New York: Macmillan, p. 180.
63 Murdock: Our Primitive Contemporaries (op. cit.), p. 34.
64 Spencer, Baldwin, F.J. Gillen (1904). The Northern Tribes of Central Australia. London: MacMillan & Co., p. 475.
65 Yengoyan, Aram (1972). “Biological and demographic components in aboriginal Australian socio-economic organization.” Oceania, 43: p. 88.
66 Roth, H. Ling (1899). The Aborigines of Tasmania. Halifax: King & Sons, pp. 162s.
67 Murdock: Our Primitive Contemporaries (op. cit.), p. 7.
68 Ritchie, Jane and James Ritchie (1979). Growing Up in Polynesia. Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, p. 39.
69 Firth, Raymond (1983). Primitive Polynesian Economy. London: Routledge, p. 44.
70 Dibble, Sheldon (1839). History and General Views of the Sandwich Islands Mission. New York: Taylor & Dodd, p. 123.
71 Handy, E.S. and Mary Kawena Pukui (1958). The Polynesian Family System in Ka-’U, Hawaii. New Plymouth, New Zealand: Avery Press, p. 327.
72 Ritchie: Growing Up in Polynesia (op. cit.), p. 189.
73 Oliver, Douglas (1974). Ancient Tahitan Society. Honolulu: University Press of Hawii, Vol. I, p. 425.
74 Schrire, Carmel and William Lee Steiger (1974). “A matter of life and death: an investigation into the practice of female infanticide in the Artic.” Man: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, 9: p. 162.
75 Fridtjof, Nansen (1894). Eskimo Life. London: Longmans, Green & Co., p. 152.
76 Garber, Clark (1947). “Eskimo Infanticide.” Scientific monthly, 64: p. 98.
77 Langer: “Infanticide: a historical survey” (op. cit.), p. 354.
78 Balikci, Asen (1984), “Netslik,” in Damas, David, Handbook of North American Indians (Arctic), Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, p. 427.
79 Savishinsky, Joel and Hiroko Sue Hara (1981), “Hare,” in Helm, June, Handbook of North American Indians (Subarctic). Smithsonian Institution, p. 322. See also: Gillespie, Beryl (1981), “Mountain Indians,” in Helm, June, Handbook of North American Indians (Subarctic). Smithsonian Institution, p. 331.
80 Shimkin, Demitri, B. (1986), “Eastern Shoshone,” in D’Azevedo, Warren L., Handbook of North American Indians (Great Basin). Smithsonian Institution, p. 330.
81 Riddell, Francis (1978), “Maidu and Konkow,” in Heizer, Robert F., Handbook of North American Indians (California). Smithsonian Institution, p. 381.
82 Campbell, T.N. (1983), “Coahuitlecans and their neighbors,” in Ortiz, Alonso, Handbook of North American Indians (Southwest). Smithsonian Institution, p. 352.
83 Johnson, Orna (1981), “The socioeconomic context of child abuse and neglect in native South America,” in Korbin, Jill, Child Abuse and Neglect, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 63.
84 Cotlow, Lewis (1971). The Twilight of the Primitive. New York: Macmillan, p. 65.
85 de Meer, Kees, Roland Bergman and John S. Kushner (1993). “Socio-cultural determinations of child mortality in Southern Peru: including some methodological considerations.” Social Science and Medicine, 36: pp. 323, 328.
86 Hastings, James (1955). Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. NY: Scribner’s Sons, Vol. I, p. 6.
87 Bugos, Paul E. and Lorraine M. McCarthy (1984), “Ayoreo infanticide: a case study,” in Hausfater, Glenn and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Infanticide, Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives, New York: Aldine, p. 510.
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The objective of Day of Wrath is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next time I will reproduce the penultimate chapter. Day of Wrath will be available again in printed form.
Christianity: bringer of filth and disease
Ecclesiastical censorship and suppression of Western scientific and technical knowledge facilitated the spread and transmission of disease across Europe. This operated in tandem with the Christian denigration of the human body as a vehicle for sin. Instead of searching for the natural causes of disease, as the Hippocratic writers once did, the official doctrine of the church discouraged the practice of medicine by attributing all bodily ailment to the results of sin and diabolical possession. This retarded progress in the healing arts, leaving Europe at the mercy of disease for hundreds of years.
The negative influence of Christianity in Europe is revealed by the estimated mortality rates from the 14th century Black Death, one of the most devastating pandemics in human history. This was always significantly higher in regions and among populations where Christianity happened to be the dominant religion. For example, although plague reduced the population of the Moslem world by one-third, this was still less than the estimated two-thirds for Europe. These macroregional differences in mortality are also reflected on much smaller geographic scales. England under the Plantagenets lost one-half of her population to plague, whereas Mamluk Egypt lost only one-third.
Among populations, Jews had lower death rates than Christians. Their apparent immunity to the disease aroused the suspicions of their European contemporaries, who implicated them in a clandestine plot to kill Christians. They were viciously persecuted as a result.
Why the differential rates in mortality between Moslem, Jew and Christian? Judaism and Islam have long maintained personal hygiene as an integral part of daily ritual practice; Christianity, because of its hostility to the body, shunned personal hygiene as worldly and materialist. The church in Spain, for example, regularly encouraged believers to avoid bathing to better distinguish themselves from the hated Moors and Jews. Differences in physical cleanliness between entire geographic regions and whole populations either mitigated or exacerbated the ravages of the bubonic plague.
The triumph of Christianity in late antiquity devalued human physical existence in the eyes of Europeans. Human sexuality was regarded as a necessary evil, to be avoided except for procreation in marriage. The church also discouraged Christians from bathing because concern for the body was viewed as an obstacle to salvation. Although it came very close, the church did not officially ban personal hygiene. Instead, the Christians who ruled Europe allowed the great network of public baths that once dotted the empire, including the aqueducts that supplied them with water, to fall into a state of permanent disrepair.
St. Jerome once said: “He who has bathed in Christ has no need of a second bath.” This injunction was taken seriously by Christian ascetics. They practiced ritual mortification of the flesh by refusing to wash themselves. They wore the same garments every day until they were reduced to rags. The stench that was produced was known by Christians as alousia or the “odor of sanctity.” Saints like Agnes and Margaret of Hungary were revered by Christians because of their rejection of physical hygiene.
In the Rule of St. Benedict of Nursia, only those monks who were sick and infirm were granted permission to bathe. Monks in good health and the young were encouraged to wallow in their own filth and excrement. Benedict’s rule was the most influential in the history of Western monasticism. It was embraced by thousands of medieval religious communities as a foundational monastic text.
Primitive Christianity was characterized by its intolerance and intransigence, and by considering itself as the only way of salvation for all men on the planet. These characteristics were inherited from Judaism, from which it came and which it imitated.
Christianity shows, paradoxically, that to consider all human beings equal is the worst form of intolerance: because it is assumed as a dogma of faith that the same religion or moral is valid and obligatory for all men, and therefore it is imposed, even against their will. This aspect was renewed later with the other great and virulent egalitarian doctrines: democracy and communism.
The Aryans, accepting the difference of peoples, also accepted that they worshiped gods other than their own and had different customs; and they would never have thought of preaching their religion or their morals outside of their town. It would have seemed ridiculous to preach Odin’s worship among blacks, for example; and it made no difference to them that the Semites worshiped Molech.
The tactic of the old European was always to dominate through military triumph, not to forcefully convert or manipulate thoughts. The reaction of Christianity, on the other hand, was to wipe out everything that could remind us our old beliefs and traditions. Any medicinal knowledge of plants or animals was branded as heresy and persecuted. In fact, any kind of knowledge that was not Judeo-Christian was persecuted conscientiously. Spiritual terror had made its appearance in Europe.
This is Christianity, and what came after: feints, collages, palimpsests and mixtures of it with paganism in unstable combinations that never finished curdling in the confused European collective unconscious. In those days the schizophrenia of the current West started: the debate between the heroic Greco-Roman heritage or the humanist Judeo-Christian heritage.
The founders and the great conquerors had wanted their peoples to triumph and be eternal on Earth. They did not achieve it in the long term, and all disappeared. The Romans, then, went to swell that macabre list. In the West, the future of millennia belonged to the Germans, who established throughout Western Europe feudal kingdoms where they rose as aristocracy.
I have listed facts that marked the end of Classical Antiquity with all its wisdom, and the beginning of the Dark Ages. This age used as a tool the Germans, but the Germans were not guilty. They only gave the coup de grâce to a decadent monster—and it was precisely the Germans who preserved Roman works of art from Christian destruction when they seized power (consider the case of King Theodoric).
The occultation would last in Europe until the time of Catharism; of the Vikings and Crusades in the 11th century: when the European knights discovered the tradition that the East had kept. Some friars devoted themselves to collecting natural knowledge such as medicine or botany. The Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Persian and to some extent Greek and Hindu legacies were preserved by the Islamic civilisation which, unlike Christianity, not only did not destroy the pagan legacy, but kept it.
The resurgence of European spirituality came from the warrior and chivalric castes. And the results, some cleaner than others, were the Holy Roman-Germanic Empire, the Vikings, the Occitan civilization, the Templars, the Italian Renaissance with its fascination for the Greco-Roman world, and the Spanish empire.
There are those who get themselves into a mess with the ‘Christian heritage’ of Europe. I do not. I see Europeans living with some customs and their natural rites, beautiful and harmonious, which automatically led to the most normal thing in the world, thus taking part in that immense orchestra that is the Earth.
I see a fanatical creed preached by Semitic fundamentalists from the East and Africa, who inflamed the spirits of the world’s scum against the good people; against the native Europeans, against the representatives of order and light. They said that our ancestral customs were abominations. They said that those who practiced them were sinners. They said that our science was demonic sorcery, and our art, blasphemy.
They said that whoever did not kneel before a strange new oriental god deserved the worst torments. They cursed the strong, the nobles, the fighters, the pure, the philosophers and the wise, and blessed the slaves, the sick, the trampled, the prostitutes, the ignorant and the cowardly.
They destroyed the legacy that we had accumulated for centuries. They killed our leaders. They put an end to an Empire that could well, under Germanic influence, spread throughout the world.
They plunged Europe into ignorance and banned knowledge. For centuries, they spread depression, guilt and the feeling of sin, introducing into Europe that cancer that is the Old Testament, and that castrating poison that is the New Testament.
If Europe could still thrive in these conditions, it was not thanks to Christianity but in spite of it, and thanks to the things that Christianity had not yet touched.
This piece is from a statue of the emperor Hadrian that should have measured about five meters, and was found in Sagalassos, present south-central Turkey, where Christianity took root early.
In short, Christianity was a subversive movement of agitation against Rome, against Greece and, ultimately, against the European world.
We have to assume that what has come down to us from the Greco-Roman world is only a tiny part of what was really there, and that it was taken away by the Judeo-Christian destruction.
Christianity, as a slave rebellion devised and led by Jews with the aim of destroying Roman power—and, ultimately, all European power—was and is a doctrine aimed at converting vigorous peoples into domesticated flock of sheep.
In these arguments, they always mix in this new definition of pedophilia, conflating attraction to a 15-year-old… with attraction 5-year-old. Like it’s the same thing, because it’s all “children” under the age of consent.
But he also wrote: “I have nothing against Catholics. But the fact is, the homosexual mafia has taken over this organization.” Those of us who have studied psychohistory, the study of childrearing methods through the millennia, know that even the Early Church tolerated pederasty through the practice of offering boys in their early teens to the monasteries. Later in the article Anglin adds pictures of Muslims throwing homosexuals over high buildings and ends his article with the sign: #WhiteSharia.
This is why The West’s darkest Hour has been hammering with the histories of the white race by William Pierce and Arthur Kemp. And even those stories are preliminary: we need far more detailed studies from the POV of the 14 words.
The trouble with the White Sharia meme is that it’s ultimately Semitic. We should hate Muslims as much as we hate Jews and, for those with historical memory, the Carthaginians. In The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour I used the ideas of a MGTOW blogger that has no use of the White Sharia meme to reassert masculinity.
Exactly the same can be said about homosexuality. We don’t need to find inspiration in ISIS in trying to figure out what should a Fourth Reich do with the homo problem. Find inspiration in how Himmler dealt with it! (Those who argue that the Greco-Roman world accepted homosexuality should become better acquainted with the classic literature, as in those times the pederasts had to ask permission to the father before seducing the adolescent.)
In either case, we don’t need to find inspiration in Islam. Just study the fucking history of the white race!
“I’m going to march arm and arm down the street with sandniggers and talk about how open minded I am about this great religion of peace, Islam.” —direct quote from faggot Frenchy right before his head was lopped off by a kebab.
I stole this hilarious satire from The Daily Stormer, but some of the 1500+ comments in that site and elsewhere may be confusing.
The facts are simple: the jihad attack was ultimately caused by “altruist” policies of open borders throughout the West after the fair race lost the Second World War. Christian / Neochristian axiology is the poisoned arrow behind the masses of immigrants into the West, including Muslim invasion in France by the millions.
Cuckasians / cuckasoids!
Another thread on The Daily Stormer is the best I’ve seen as to date regarding the cuckasian Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who have allowed this.
